Presently, with development of the automobile industry and improvement of the urban traffic environments, the number of automobiles is increasing steadily. As a consequence, the parking problem becomes increasingly prominent in urban areas, and a lot of public parking lots have appeared correspondingly.
Public parking lots, also termed as roadside temporary parking lots, refer to places on roads or at the roadsides where vehicles can be parked and managed at a cost. Such public parking spaces are open without distinct entrances and exits. Because they allow people to park their vehicles conveniently and rapidly, the public parking lots have become indispensable to modern cities with an increasingly larger traffic flow.
The public parking lots are usually distributed dispersedly and it is difficult to collect the parking space information, so charging and management are usually carried out in a manual way by deploying a monitoring station. That is, vehicles temporarily parked within a specific range are charged by an administrator according to the parking duration; and generally, a start parking time is recorded manually for each vehicle and, when the vehicle is to leave a parking lot, a parking duration is calculated and a corresponding fee is charged by the administrator who will also gives a receipt note. However, this way of manually charging and management for the public parking lots has the following disadvantages:
1. the coverage is limited: it is impossible for the fixed manual parking management stations to cover every corner of a city;
2. it has a low efficiency and wastes the human resource: because at least one administrator must be assigned in each monitoring station, the human resource cannot be utilized efficiently; and
3. the cash flow is relatively large, so it is difficult to monitor each monitoring station.
In order to solve the problems associated with the way of manually charging and managing, a few metropolises have attempted to use parking meters for charging management of public parking lots in accordance with experiences of foreign countries. However, although the parking meters are convenient to use and highly efficient, can operate accurately and allow for unattended operation, they also have the following disadvantages:
1. they are costly: each mechanical parking meter costs about RMB 2000˜5000, and non-contact parking meters are even more costly.
2. the infrastructure installation cost and the maintenance cost are both high: installation of the parking meters, embedding of lines and the like all represent a high work load, and because the parking meters are exposed to sunlight and rains, they are very liable to aging and even sometimes to man-caused damage, which results in a maintenance cost;
3. they occupy spaces of the roads or the parking lots, and adversely affect the appearance of cities; and
4. unattended operation still cannot be achieved in practical use.
Therefore, the way of management by using the parking meters is costly but does not allow for low-cost operation, so it fails to be widely used.
Accordingly, there is a urgent need for the persons skilled in the art to solve the technical problem of how to reduce the investment cost and improve the monitoring management of the public parking lots.